We have had no good comic operas of late, because the real world has been more comic than any possible opera.

Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.

The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.

It is still bad taste to be an avowed atheist. But now it is equally bad taste to be an avowed Christian.

Teach to the young, men's enduring truths, and let the learned amuse themselves with their passing errors.

There are two kinds of peacemakers in the modern world; and they are both, though in various ways, a nuisance. The first peacemaker is the man who goes about saying that he agrees with everybody. He confuses everybody. The second peacemaker is the man who goes about saying that everybody agrees with him. He enrages everybody. Between the two of them they produce a hundred times more disputes and distractions than we poor pugnacious people would ever have thought of in our lives.

Facts by themselves can often feed the flame of madness, because sanity is a spirit.